S2S Sisters: “Navigating the Seasons: Living Well with Our Emotions” by three sisters

Our prayer is that you will be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might according to His glorious power. Hello everyone, and welcome again to Strength to Strength Sisters. I'm Jamila Kurtz, and I'm so happy to be here with you all today. The vision of Strength to Strength Sisters is to encourage women to be catalysts in advancing the kingdom through biblical teaching, testimonies of faithful women, and thought-provoking discussions. I'm excited today as we come into the presence of God and hear from the hearts of women who are passionate. I know each of them. They're passionate about living well with our emotions. Just to note that for today's Q&A, after our speakers are done, we're going to be receiving questions through the chat box just to be able to better facilitate our discussion today.

So feel free to direct them in the chat box to either me or to Christina Baer, who is taking care of the tech side of our call today. Let's pause a moment to pray before we proceed.

God, we just come before You, and I thank You, Lord, so much for this opportunity that we could come before You as Your daughters. And Lord, we just want to worship You in this moment. And thank You for Your Son, Jesus, who died for us. And thank You, Lord, for the way that You so fearfully and wonderfully made us, all of us, Lord, even our emotions.

And Lord, how You've given us the gift, Lord, that we can feel and how our feelings, Lord, can direct us, Lord, into service for You. So God, I'm just excited to hear, Lord, in the next few moments what You're going to share with us. Thank You. Thank You so much for all that You do for us.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

So our call today, as you have probably seen in our announcements, is structured just a bit different. We have three speakers with us today. And so right now, before we proceed any further, I'm going to let them each just introduce themselves just a bit. So go ahead with that.

Edith, you can go ahead first. Okay. I'm Edith Birkholder, married to Merle Birkholder. So I'm a wife. I'm a mother to five children, three biological, two foster, and a grandmother to four.

My name is Doreen Kurtz, and I live in Western Massachusetts with my husband, Joe. We are expecting our eighth child at this point. So I'm looking forward to sharing this panel with you.

Hello everyone. My name is Tirza Kurtz, and Jamila is actually my mom. And I'm so excited to be here today. I'm almost 21, and I've learned a lot of things the hard way about emotions and dealing with our emotions. And so I'm excited to be here and learn and grow and share some of the things I've learned. And I'm currently living in Virginia after living in Kenya for the last seven and a half years. So that in itself has been a growing experience. And yeah, I'm excited to see what God has for us today.

Thank you. Wow. This is just great to have each of you here with us today. So Edith, Doreen, Tirza, I'm just wondering, before we get started, if you can tell me just one word, what's one word that you're feeling in the moment?

Let me see. Tirza, you go first.

A lot of excitement, but also apprehension.

Doreen?

A little shy and a little nervous.

Edith?

A bit disorganized because I had some problems getting on, and my husband wasn't here to help.

Wow. So you noticed that they each described an emotion. Each of them gave a different feeling that they had. You know, our emotions, it's been said that they're what give us energy. Like, think about the root word of emotion as motion. And it's what helps us to be able to respond. It's how we feel.

But even deeper, I believe our emotions are a gift from God. And it's part of what it means to be made in His image.

Proverbs 4:23 says, "Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." Emotions are, like I said, that gift that help us. And from it flows all of our life. And it's been said that it's impossible to become spiritually mature if we're still emotionally immature.

Let me repeat that. It's impossible to become spiritually mature if we're still emotionally immature. So how do we become emotionally mature? You know, in 2 Corinthians, it says, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child. But when I became a man, or let me say, for our purposes in our discussion today, an adult, I put away childish things." You know, it's what we all so desperately want. We want to be able to embrace our emotions and not be ruled by them. We were created to feel. But you know, I was thinking about that as women, we face all these times of whatever it may be, hormonal upheaval or imbalance, or just so many different things that come into our lives, depending on the different stages we're in.

And you know, sometimes we can allow ourselves to react in damaging ways when we're feeling all these different emotions and then having all these different circumstances that come into our lives. So how can we navigate the changing seasons of our lives? How do we learn to live well with our emotions in the beauty of Romans 8 and 1 Peter 2? Those are two chapters that I feel like are kind of my emotional rule of life, Romans 8 and 1 Peter 2.

So I'm excited to hear what God is going to share today through Tirza, Doreen, and Edith. I'm praying for you. We're all praying for you. May God's Spirit be your guide as you share with us. So we'll go ahead and we'll start with Tirza.

So she's the youngest, obviously. And like Ashley said, she's my daughter. I'm a bit overwhelmed thinking about the opportunity that we have to do this together, even though we're half a world apart. Thanking God for this. And then Doreen will share.

And then Edith will share. And be prepared with your questions, your comments. We want to have a good discussion afterward. So Tirza, go ahead. Okay, thank you. I'm so excited to share today. And as Mom was talking, I was listening to her and I was just thinking how so much of what I've learned has come from her and she could probably say all the things that I'm going to say today. And I was also planning to start with a verse from Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23. And it's very common and we hear it a lot. We've read it so many times over the years.

And it says, "Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it flow all the issues of life." And I remember probably 10 years ago sitting down with Mom and I'd come home from school and she told me, I had come home talking about who likes who and all those types of things. And she told me that I have to guard my heart because every time I give a little piece of my heart to someone or I say I like someone or I have feelings for a guy, that takes a little piece of my heart that I want to save for my future husband ultimately and just save in order to love others while I think and love God well.

And I wish I would have taken that advice 10 years ago and held it really close to me and valued it and treasured it and followed it because I've learned a lot of things the hard way. And I'm still learning things.

Just because I'm here doesn't mean I have life figured out in any way.

So today I don't really want to give you a list of dos and don'ts, or I don't really think there is a list of dos and don'ts that you can do this or not do that and you'll have your emotions figured out or you'll be able to live an emotionally pure life. I haven't found it to be that way. For a lot of years, I tried to just follow a list, or if I did this and I did this and I did this, then I'd be fine and I wouldn't struggle with my emotions. And in the last year, especially, I realized that it's not that way. And I'm going to share a few things that have helped me a lot.

So it's something we all have to realize on our own and it's a journey we all have to walk on our own and it's not necessarily, we can't necessarily look at someone else's life and see that they did that and so I can do that and therefore I'll be emotionally healthy and emotionally pure.

And the first thing that I'd like to highlight is that I think in order to live emotionally healthy and stay pure emotionally, I have to know who my identity is in and who created me. And a place that I often go when I think about this is Daniel chapter 1, when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had been taken captive and they were in a strange land and the king, he was trying to change their identity. And first of all, he changed their names and he was going to use them in his kingdom. And I find it so interesting that he changed their identity first because he knew that by changing their identity and confusing them, that he would also be able to influence their appetites and their worldview and I think their desires also.

And I think that's often how, say, in the lies that he targets us as young women with, is he gets us all confused about who we are and who we should be and who we should be striving to be. And he confuses us there and he knows that when he has us confused on that, then he also has control of our desires and our appetites.

And so I'm sure that we all know who we are, but I'm just going to highlight that a tiny bit, but we're all women and we're created in the image of God. And God created us with desires and he created us with the desire to be known and loved and to belong. And those are good desires.

And we live in a fallen world. And so those desires, although they're good and they're from God, we try to fulfill them from the wrong places.

And so what do we do with our emotions? What do we do when we are struggling with what that guy thinks of us? When we are struggling with trying to fit in something that has helped me a lot is envisioning it like there's two ditches. And so the one ditch is trying to suppress my emotions. And so I can try to suppress it. I can act like it's not there. I can, yeah, I think you know what I mean, but I can just try to just block that side of my life. And then there's another ditch that's someone who's just giving into everything and telling everyone everything that they're feeling and capitalizing on it and living by their emotions.

And I think we've both felt ourselves in both ditches and known people who live that way. And it's hard to, when we're surrounded by a world that lives that way, it's hard to not. But something that I've been working on, and it's hard. It's really hard and it's a daily battle. But I think that a really beautiful way to live is to realize that God gave us our emotions. He created us with them. And so every time I struggle with something, I can give that back to him. And it's easy to say, but it's way harder to do. For me, when I'm struggling with someone to say, "God, you created me with this desire, and so right now I give this desire back to you."

And that is, yeah, I think that is one of the most valuable or most powerful tools we have is to just surrender that desire back to him. And surrender and releasing control is really, really hard, but it builds so much strength in us.

So just some practical things that I've found in my own life that help is to spend discipline time with God, especially in times when I am struggling a lot. It's easy to just lay in bed at night and let your mind wander and stay awake for a while thinking. But a tool that's really helpful is to read Psalms or maybe a really encouraging book of the Bible to you.

Just read that. And don't really try to get anything out of it necessarily, but just read it and fill your mind with the word. And invite others to pray for you, to battle with you. Another important thing I think is to use prayer targets. And so the way this works is if there's something that you're a battle you're facing or something you're really struggling with, that every time that comes to your mind, every time that you're tempted to feel anger towards someone, every time you're tempted to give into lust, every time you're tempted to, yeah, whatever your battle is, to give into that, have someone specific or a situation that you pray for. And I know that it's really hard in the moment to remember that.

But I think it's so powerful because if Satan knows that every time he hits me with a struggle, if he hits me with a temptation, that I'm going to pray for this situation or this person who's struggling, I don't think he's going to be as quick to hit us with that temptation. And so that's something I found really, really, really helpful. And for us as young girls, especially, we like to talk to all our friends about everything that is happening in our lives and all the things we're feeling and just fill them in on everything. And I found that to be really, really unhelpful. And it's an easy trap to fall into. But try to go to someone who's older and wiser, your mom or an elderly from your church or an older single woman from your youth group.

Find someone that you can go and talk to and will help you just see the situation in a different perspective. And that's something that it's another thing. It's very humbling to go to someone and say, "This is what I've been struggling with and this is the situation." And when you actually verbalize those things and talk about them, it often seems very trivial.

And so even if, yeah, it's not so much about telling someone as it is about just getting your struggle in the open and being able to see it from a different perspective. And especially if you're struggling with guys, work on developing really close and healthy friendships with girls.

We get a lot of affirmation from guys and they make us feel good when they give us attention. And it's so easy to just live off of that. But it's so important that we have relationships with girls that are healthy and that they know where we are spiritually and emotionally and what our struggles are. And that's so, so powerful.

So just I have on my notes, don't stuff it and don't spread it. So don't stuff the things that you're struggling with. Get them out in the open and bring them to the light. Especially bring them before the throne of grace. It takes grace. All of these things take so much grace.

I know I often, when I would feel a certain way, I would just blame myself and I would just get so stuck in a rut of trying to just, from on my own power, get out of this cycle. And you can't. You can't do that on your own. It takes God. It takes so much grace.

So don't lose hope. Stay disciplined. Communicate with God. And most of all, remember that God created you to belong and to be loved and that our deepest heart's desire is fulfilled by him alone.

Thank you, Teresa. That was very beautiful. And I can see that some of our points are going to overlap here and that is okay.

So I am asked to present on the middle-aged group of women today.

And it would be so lovely to hear from all the other middle-aged women on here. But I'm going to share with you a few things that have become very meaningful to me. I was thinking about the different life scenarios of women in my age group. And I find myself in the wife and mother life scenario. But I was thinking about women in my age group that have different life callings than what I do. For instance, ladies in my age group that have the calling of teaching, nursing, Bible translation, things like this that bring with their calling a whole set of emotions and emotional spectrum.

You have a high calling on your life. You have long hours of work. You possibly have rent payments and house payments. You have your responsibility as an active member in your church. You have all the housework to do yourself.

And you're living alone. Maybe you are a wife that has the emotional strain of infertility or miscarriage and all the things that this brings to you as a person and to your marriage. Maybe you are a woman that has a marriage that hasn't worked out or you are surviving or coming out of abuse or trauma.

And you have the loneliness that comes with that. If you're single parenting, you have the load of childcare. Are your finances going to be there for you? Where do you fit in your church, family, and all those things?

I find myself in the category of wife and mother. And maybe two adjectives that are most common for this stage of life are busy and tired. That sounds negative, but it can be the way it is.

Often in this stage of life, we have business to think about with our husbands. We have making our finances meet, caring for our children, possibly homeschooling and church responsibilities and relationships. You're in the thick of it. And our marriage to invest in and keep up with.

I'm going to dive right in here. And I'm going to paint a little picture of a recent scenario in my life. And this is a little bit of a vulnerable thing for me to do. But I feel like it sort of sets the stage for the points that I'd like to share that have become meaningful to me in helping me grow in emotional maturity and spiritual maturity.

So let me paint this picture.

Not that long ago, first I want to say this. My personality is I like new ideas. I like to work hard. I am used to doing things myself. I can pretty much do, could pretty much do what I set my hand to. I like to be involved in things and have my fingers in the new and exciting projects and prospects.

My body was, is physically strong. Sort of my life was pretty easy on those levels. I loved life and I loved new ideas and new things to do and challenges.

Years through our marriage, Joe and I have dreamed of starting a business together. And this began to materialize. God worked some things out for us that pushed us to start this even in a very busy stage of our life.

And we moved ahead with it by faith. I was expecting a baby. We were going to open our cafe at a certain time of the year. The town we chose was very difficult for inspections and licenses. And the timing started to be off. And all the dreams of working shoulder to shoulder with him and getting those new recipes ready and training my people and things like that started to not work out right. And it started to fall right over the birth of my baby.

On the heels of having my baby and postpartum, I was diagnosed with Lyme's disease and became quite sick very quickly. And I don't know if you're familiar with Lyme's disease, but this can attack your emotions. I didn't totally understand all those things at that point.

Bell's palsy came into part of my face and made me very insecure socially, even with my family. You try to eat. You try to eat when your face is paralyzed and it feels very, very vulnerable.

We stepped into a very liberal town and we were faced with the rawness of our secular world in ways that I was unprepared for.

This called for deepening trust and communication in my marriage.

There was temptation and spiritual attack and disturbing dreams at night and sharp rebuke from a friend that we did not realize had strains in our relationship. And just in a nutshell, this left me very emotionally weak, physically weak, and needing to face things about myself that I had never even realized were there: control and lack of surrender, mistrust, and many of these things that we need to think back to. What are our emotions telling us about ourself?

So I'm going to let that there. And I'm going to briefly tell you to move from our Christian worldview to the secular one. I asked my midwife the other day, she's a psych nurse, "What do you see in our age group of women? What do you most of all see as being what they're dealing with?" And her answer came very quickly: identity.

In these middle-aged years, as we're heading towards 40, our body is aging. And some have had their children and their children don't need them as much anymore. Or maybe they have pursued a career and they don't have children or a partner and their life looks desolate. And they're asking the question, "Who am I?"

So with that question in mind, I want to say, "Who are you and whose are you?" is very foundational. It has been to me to discover this. And I'm going to read some verses from Matthew. And this might sound really off the cuff here to read this, but just wait. "And as you go, preach, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils. Freely you have received, freely give.'" And I have a side note in my Bible that says, "Have I received the kingdom? Have I been healed and delivered?" And I think these questions need to be asked as we find out where our identity has been and is.

We are daughters of God. And until we understand and embrace this, we have a very difficult time with our emotions.

We are daughters of God. He deeply loves us, desires us. The King has greatly desired your beauty. And he longs to provide the intimacy that we cannot find anywhere else. I don't care how good your personal relationships are with your friends or in your marriage.

You will have this longing that only Jesus can fill.

So having said that, I'm going to briefly go over some points that have helped me with my emotions.

Going back to those questions, have I been delivered, healed, and received the kingdom? We need to think of weaknesses, maybe even in past generations, that affect us today: anger, shame, condemnation, fantasy or immorality, and break those ties in Jesus' name.

They need not define or determine our experience.

As Irenaeus says, "The gospel is the way we learn to be fully alive."

Cultivate intimacy with God, childlike honesty and wonder. And one of my mentors, I've heard her say this, "Run like a little girl and cast yourself into his lap." Sometimes we find ourself in such weakness where I've been there. I've been in this place where we can say very little even for what is going on inside of us.

More than, "I need you. I need you. I need you."

Another thing that has revolutionized life is to envision and believe that Jesus' kingdom, his teachings, his promises, his power are relevant to my situation right now. This changes how we do the most mundane tasks, how we relate and respond to the ones that we walk most closely with.

For instance, my little children pretend that I'm serving Jesus. And in my struggle back there in the testimony I shared, when I needed to relinquish control and check out the perversions of my own heart and embrace my role and come home and care for my babies to pretend that they were Jesus, I can show hospitality to them. His kingdom is growing in my home with these tiny disciples around my table.

And if you are a woman with a different calling, pretend that that old woman or man that you're caring for is Jesus in the way you dress them and wash them and speak to them. Every human being deserves dignity and respect.

In the vulnerabilities of pregnancy, you can feel so big and awkward and not always very beautiful or graceful. One of my mentors said to me one day, "View your body as a vessel through which Jesus' kingdom can grow." That has helped me so often.

Don't blame your stress on your little children. Make a large margin for the little children. They're part of Jesus' kingdom, and he always made room for them. And there's a mantra in our world today that blames our stress and emotional strain on little children, and that's not right.

Taking care of my body, building my body with exercise and a healthy diet, lots of dark leafy greens, lots of water, take my minerals, pray as I exercise, and view my body not as needing a perfect shape, but as a temple for the Holy Ghost. And we care for it for him. This is also an investment in my marriage.

Shower and moisturize instead of scrolling your phone. This can be done to your own self. Or if you're feeling emotionally strained, find one of your little children. They're so comforting. And lotion them and talk to them and reach out to them.

They're so pure in their affection.

Learn to rest. This is advice that's been very hard for me to take, but I had to do it in the time of sickness in new ways. Maybe you need to rest or maybe to combat depression or overwhelm, just do the next thing.

Comb back your hair, pick up the toys in one room.

Ask for help. I came to a place where my mind was so overwrought and my emotions were so weak that I knew that I needed to talk to somebody. And I was hardly brave enough to do it because this makes you in a very vulnerable place.

God worked a miracle for me in this way. I did ask for a mentor, but in a conversation with another older woman, the Holy Spirit led her to ask me some questions. I was supposed to be asking her some questions and ministering to her. She asked me some questions.

And it hit on a spot that I had been unwilling to verbalize to anybody else. God is so kind and gentle how he leads us that way.

Build some new habits. Our bodies and our minds and the lives of our children are bettered for it. Even our spiritual life is bettered for it.

Another quote from Irenaeus: "The glory of God is the human being fully alive." And I think about this in the realm of emotion, exercise, and intellect. Stimulate your mind with the word of God, the world's needs, and reading something, even if it's a tiny snatch.

I like to read a little something that my husband is interested in. It makes for good conversation and stimulates my mind. Have an acute conscience about what you are allowing to influence you. Back to my conversation with my midwife, along with identity of who I am, she said the effects of internet and social media are bringing women into the psych ward because they can't live up to the pictures and the lifestyles that are being portrayed on social media. And this is not just for our young people. This is for you and I today.

It can look like we need to have the perfect home, life, and body.

And we need to remember and screen what's influencing us. We don't think we're easily influenced, but we are.

Our world is hypersexualized and pornographic, and we are faced with the visual images all over the place of the perfect life and body. And we need to remember what God's view is of beauty.

Have an acute conscience about what you're reading. Also, the mantra that can come to us of needing my space and me time.

Have an acute conscience about emotional fidelity in your relationship to God and to your husband. Be quick to repent and confess your sin publicly. And this heals us in ways that I think sometimes we forget what public confession can do for us. And I know there's appropriate times and people and places to do that. Another point for emotional health is to build your own relationships. And when I say that, I think about women and the way they love to know things and are being prone to gossip, abstain from gossip, stalking on social media so you can know things.

Sometimes this means we miss out on juicy conversations, but it's incredibly freeing to build your own relationships with people and keep a high bar with what you share and what you need to know.

In our church and community lives, sometimes, though we deeply need community and we need a vulnerable place to share, sometimes trust levels are not what they ought to be. I think by abstaining from gossip and needing to know everything, our lives begin to speak for themselves, and we become trustworthy people. And we begin to build relationships that are helpful to our emotional health, but it also makes a space for us to be able to pour into other people's lives, and we feed each other.

Practice defiant faith and worship and surrender, even in times of weakness and sickness and trial.

I think about a couple of scenarios from scripture: David's repentance and worship. It was so vulnerable and organic. Hannah's prayer for a child, the woman who washed Jesus' feet. All of these are beautiful, beautiful examples of emotional expression.

And celebrate, find beauty and celebrate at meals or in relationships, admiring the goodness of God.

So just quickly, some things that just thrill me to think about. Just quickly, some verses. Jesus said, "I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly. The king's daughter is all glorious within. She shall be the joyful mother of children.

She that believes on me out of her belly shall flow rivers of living water. He satisfies my mouth with good things so that my youth is renewed like the eagles."

That's all I have to share.

Well, as I have listened to Tirzah and Doreen, it takes me back to when I was in that age frame. I'm 70 years old now, and life has its different phases and different emotional stages too. When I was in my mid-years in the stage that Doreen is now, I definitely struggled with PMS, premenstrual syndrome, where I would feel more irritable the week before I had my period. And that was a real struggle for me. But it really helped me to find out that that is normal for a lot of women and learn to take care of myself during that time, like give myself extra rest if I need it, to try not to schedule stressful times if I have that freedom to do.

That made me feel more nurtured and understand the rhythms of my body and how to work with it. A book that has really helped me in understanding all of that is by Jean Lush, Emotional Phases of a Woman's Life. And I have really been helped by her.

Now that I'm past menopause, I find that life is more even-keeled, and I don't have to struggle as much with ups and downs. But I think very commonly for women in older years is we have more anxiety. We have more worries. Maybe it's because we have lived life longer and have seen more things that can happen. I don't know what all causes it. But for me, these days, choosing to be thankful and focusing on positive things are very important. And so Philippians is such a good resource for that.

Philippians 4:6, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God." I really admire other ladies who I see being positive, and I want to be that kind of a woman too. We have choices what to focus on. Right now, I am trying to support a friend who has lost two of her sons to tragic circumstances, and she has cancer that she's battling. And I see her struggle with negativity. And I just want to tell her, "Be positive. Just think on the things that build you up." And I know it's very easy for us to look at other people and think that, but it's a challenge in our own lives to look at the positive things.

But as we do, it really helps us in our own life stages. And in Philippians 4:8, it gives you some of those positive things, the true things, the honorable things, the things that are right and pure, lovely. What is of good repute? What is excellent, worthy of praise? Let your mind dwell on these things. We're told to take our minds, the thoughts of our mind, captive. And we can do that. When you start finding yourself going, your mind going round and around on negative things, or if you're struggling with a relationship, you can choose to think of the things listed in Philippians 4:8. And I had to do that in my life with a relationship that I was struggling with.

And I also took the Christian's armor that has been so helpful for me to put a song to each of the Christian's armor and to make myself think and sing that. Just help to get the negative thoughts out of my mind. I liked some of the things that Tirzah and Doreen shared about having regular routines for healthy emotions, like our Bible reading and prayer, prayer targets, sleep, exercise, supporting others, giving and receiving, and hobbies. One thing that is really refreshing for me is to daily take a walk for about 30 minutes.

I really enjoy birdwatching too. That's a hobby that refreshes me a lot. And my husband has joined me in that since our children are grown now too, and he takes photographs of them. So it's something we enjoy. And there's something about being outside that refreshes us in ways that are wholesome to our bodies, not just our spirit, but our soul.

Oh, it's just, I don't know how to explain it, but it's holistic. It's more than one part of us. I guess it's because God created us, and He put us in a garden when He first made mankind. And so when we're outside, we're refreshed in new ways than if we're inside all the time. I really like Proverbs 31 for us women.

The one verse, Proverbs 31:25, "Strength and dignity are her clothing," and she smiles at the future. As a woman who's in my older years, I want to have strength and dignity as my clothing. And Jean Lush, in her book, excuse me, in her book talks about being a woman of mystique.

Tirzah was talking about the balance of sharing and the balance of just closing up. I think when we continue to be interesting and not let everything just hang out there, we are retaining some mystique. We should have some people that we can share things with. I don't want to have any part of myself totally hidden. I want God to know me totally. What He does, He knows me much better than I know myself. But I have ladies who I can share my concerns with. Not everybody, but I want to be a woman of mystique.

And I think that verse about strength and dignity are part of that. I can smile at the future because I have my security in God. He is my anchor. I have learned to enter into rest more as I get older, just not worrying as much about what people think. I'm secure in knowing I'm a daughter of the king.

I really like that passage when Jesus healed the woman that had the issue of blood, and He called her daughter. There's just something so heartwarming about knowing that God calls us His daughters.

And Doreen was talking about watching gossip and restraining from that. In Proverbs 31:26, it says, "She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue." I think that's so important. We can put a lot of gossip fires to rest if we just listen and don't spread it, and if we also say something positive about the person who's being spoken ill of. And that's, I think, what I want to end with.

Thank you. Thank you so much. That was so rich. And I loved how, as each of you shared from your season, your perspective on life, there were these common, beautiful threads that came. And that was just, yeah, amazing. There's two things that I really heard that, I mean, there's a lot of things I heard, but two common threads were about being our identity, knowing whose we are.

And also, I really heard choice coming, that we can choose these things. And so often when we think about our emotions, and like Edith was talking about PMS, and Doreen was talking about pregnancy and those things, and then what Tirzah was talking about, just kind of living with this uncertainty in life and this stage when you're kind of still trying to find yourself. And it feels like there's so much that we can't even control. And so what is our choice? But thank you so much for reminding us. It made me think of a statement that I oftentimes think about, that the event doesn't choose our behavior.

Our behavior is not controlled by our feelings. We oftentimes think it's our feelings, but it's controlled by the meaning we give to our feelings. And that's why I think it's so important to be rooted in the scriptures.

If we're not rooted in the scriptures, then we're not going to be able to give that proper meaning to our emotions so we can know how to live well. So the time has come now for our Q&A. And as we said, you can go ahead and feel free and put your questions into the chat box if you have any questions. And I did want to, I had actually forgotten when I was giving the intro, so while you're thinking about anything that you'd like to ask or comment on, I want to just share my screen here.

At the beginning, if you remember, I asked them what they're feeling in the moment. And I think that our emotions, the more we become aware of our feelings, the more we can be in charge of them. And remember that we don't focus on our feeling. That's not our end goal. I love the way Doreen talked about the kingdom.

And so we just want to be able to be aware of our feelings so we can respond from maturity.

I am in charge of myself. I am going to take responsibility for my reactions so I can live to honor and glorify God. So let me just share my screen here.

Can you see what I have up here? Okay. So this is just a feelings wheel. I just think this is an interesting tool. Sometimes, yeah, when I have a lot of things that I want to process in life, and I'll actually sometimes, and I'm not exactly sure what I'm even feeling. Sometimes I like to get a feeling while out. And just to remember that all of this is a gift from God who brought us back to Himself. So the end goal is to never just sit there in our feelings, in our awareness, but the end goal is to come back to God.

Let me see here.

So I don't want to do all the talking. What's on all of your hearts? I just want to say that when you in the very beginning, Jamila, asked us what we were feeling, when I said, "I feel disorganized," I was able to go more into a feeling of thankfulness. Oh, I did get on before the whole thing started. I know I probably caused anxiety for some of the rest of you. Thank you, God, that that's all settled. So often for me, when I say or recognize a negative thing, I can move to the next thing. Yes. Yes.

Thank you, Edith. That was a beautiful example right there. How I think so many times we're especially, well, because we're Christians, right? And we're godly women. And so we're afraid of our negative emotions because we're really not supposed to feel angry, or we're not supposed to feel disgusted. But I found that if we can name it and say, "This is how I'm feeling," and then choose to be responsible for what I'm feeling, and then take it to God and say, "Okay, God, sometimes we just have to say to God, 'I don't even know what to do with this.'" But to allow God to speak with us, that's much better than sitting in that space of tension and anxiety when we—those are the times when we tend to kind of lose it.

And oftentimes, the people around us are the ones who suffer the most, or actually most times.

So thank you. I have a question here in the chat box. So the first question here is for Tirzah. The question is, "You mentioned not bottling up emotions and sharing them. Who is it that you go to personally to share hard and personal things? Is it someone in your age group? Is it an authority? And how do you decide who to share with?"

So this is an area especially I've made a lot of mistakes. And I love what Edith and Doreen brought out when they were talking about gossip and being trustworthy. I think that's a huge thing. And it's so important that we go, especially as young women, that we find someone older, I think, and maybe someone who has more life experience or someone that you just know and they have a reputation of being trustworthy.

Especially with emotions, they can change quickly. And I've often had the experience of going and spilling my emotions and spilling my feelings to someone. And then a week later, I found out from someone else what I was feeling then. And that person, they still had the perception that I still felt that way. When I had moved on, I had expressed it and moved on and was in a much more healthy place. And so that's why I think it's so important that we find older and wiser, and whether it's your authority or your parents or someone in just the community around you.

I think I can say that in almost all the places I've been in the recent past, I've found people who are close and they cared so much, and I could go and talk to and be really honest with. And it's especially important that you find someone who's not going to just affirm or validate all the ways you're feeling, but they're willing to speak truth into your life and say, "You know what? You're feeling this because of this, and that's a lie that you're believing," or, "That's an emotionally unhealthy way to view it, and you should change." And yeah.

So I think it's, yeah, important that we go not to our peers, but to someone who has life experience and they can, yeah, speak truth well.

Thank you for that. Another question. This one's for Doreen. "How do you find a mentor? Was it someone in your community, and what did you ask for?"

You're muted, Doreen.

Like I mentioned in my talk, God provided an opportunity for me to begin a relationship with an older woman. And I feel like He provided that in His mercy to me, seeing some of the very vulnerable things that I needed to verbalize to someone. So God provided that person Himself on one hand. On another hand, I specifically asked a woman that I had observed as being filled with the Holy Spirit and wisdom. And I wanted someone that didn't, like Tirzah mentioned, just affirm all my feelings.

I wanted someone that would stretch my thinking and hold me accountable. And sometimes when we ask someone that we deeply respect, it stirs in us a desire not to fail and to have a good report. So that guided me a little bit.

But I would say someone older than you that's walked a few miles ahead of you and someone in whom you sense the Spirit of God that's going to speak truth into your life. We need to be very careful about that because we, as women, are very, very easily influenced.